Bad news for the Thais indeed! Also not good for system builders. Hard disk price inflation is also bring stoked by PC mfrs buying up what drives that are available so they can meet their xmas orders. According to a computer hardware mag I read, one mfr in particular has gone from keeping 2 weeks worth of inventory to 2 months worth. Many hard disk mfrs are affected, not just those with production facilities in Thailand, as many components are made in Thailand too.

I'm in the same boat as I'm running out of storage on my main box and I was about to upgrade too. If you have partitions and/or drives that are just storage, have you tried a handy hint in the form of tune2fs to remove blocks on the drive reserved for root? I've just freed nearly 50 GB with it. Hopefully I should be able to stretch it out until after xmas, when (hopefully) flood waters and prices will have receded.